Cartography

The adventurous trumpet player, best known for his work with Supersilent and his solo records on Rune Grammofon, makes a terrific debut for ECM.

Arve Henriksen came at jazz sideways, honing his singular voice as a session player-- with David Sylvian's Nine Horses, Christian Wallumrød, Supersilent, and many others-- and through a series of fine, ambient-tinged albums for the Rune Grammofon label. These were tricky, seductively spare works that got at jazz by outlining jazz-shaped holes. They were most notable for Henriksen's adventurous, curiously-phrased style as a trumpeter. He made his instrument sound like a woodwind, a flock of birds, a Japanese flute, a punctured helium balloon. His strangled yet fluent tone is marked by a vivacious Scandinavian melancholy and a hint of noir. His meditations for trumpet and electronics expand the warm, alien landscape that Jon Hassell initially revealed, and populate it with Olivier Messiaen's avian familiars.

Cartography, Henriksen's first album for the serious-business jazz label ECM, is an ambitious showcase for his exotic syntax: Notes float on cushions of air or clang like lead; they sigh, squeak in distress, bleat, and taper off into thin shrieks. When ravishingly full tones break out from the baroque constraints, the effect is devastating. Henriksen plays the way Ian Curtis sang: A rough-and-ready yet wounded voice, always on the verge of cracking with emotion. On "Migration", he unrolls a gaseous theme that periodically dissipates into the merest pinched tones-- minimalism's pervasive mark is not omitted here. The climactic swells of "Migration" have chafed edges, as if Henriksen's trumpet had a sore throat. He spits rapidly through the mouthpiece on "Ouija" to create a richly-textured, telegraphic stutter. But he's a focused, patient player, who miraculously condenses breathtaking themes from this almost-zoological diversity.

Cartography differs from prior albums in that it was cobbled together from structured improv sessions with a variety of collaborators, both live and in-studio, over a three-year span. But it plays seamlessly, owing to Henriksen's highly-developed style, as well as to smart, immersive post-production by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, who enrich the live instrumentation with samples, field recordings, synthesizers, and programmed beats. While Henriksen's plaintive motifs are still central, pacing the development, there's a lot more going on around them than before.

"Poverty and Its Opposite" sets Henriksen's trumpet against a distant shimmer and intensifying abstract percussion; it's like a forest coming to life as night falls. "Recording Angel", with its scratchy textures, haunting Trio Mediaeval vocal samples, and founts of drenching melody, is a jazz answer to Nico Muhly's Mothertongue. From the distressed orchestral samples on "Loved One" to the staticky piano of "Sorrow and Its Opposite", the invention never flags, and never veers away from the service of severe beauty. No matter how many times I hear the two pieces that feature spoken-word poetry by David Sylvian, I can never hold onto the narrative thread for very long before I slip into the sounds of the words and the timbre of Sylvain's calming voice. That's how deep an enchantment Henriksen casts on Cartography, which maps an impressionistic world where sound is meaning.